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East meets West: knitting up cultural exchange

We’ve launched a project on Kickstarter, the creative arts crowd-funding site, to help us fund our East meets West fiber arts workshops, in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet, starting March 2011.

Can fiber arts bridge cultures?  Will women from multiple countries knit up new versions of traditional skills? Is there a common language of craft?

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Bridge to the future, unknown

Nationalism.Ethnicity. Religion. Economic status. Politics. If I had to pick a way to save our troubledworld, to guide us beyond these barriers that divide us, the tool I’d startwith to bring us together is music. Monday night, I was among the 50,000+ people who made thelong journey to an isolated corner of Istanbul,to a […]

Orienting expressed

In 1890, the newly opened Sirkeci Station was the last stop on the Orient Express, that fabled train route that led from staid Vienna to exotic Istanbul. Then and now, it is as far east as one may travel by rail, arriving in the Old City along the shore of the Bosphorus, skimming the […]

Grist for the mill

SFO International Terminal. The flowery taste of jasmine tea takes my mind back to those years I spent traveling to Hong Kong, Osaka, or Seoul from this very airport. 16-hour slogs across the Pacific, flying most often into the old Kai Tak, coming in so close between the highrises you could almost see […]

Turkish Textile Arts in Transition: A Brotherhood of Carpet Sellers

The Carpet Merchant, Jean-Léon Gérôme

The occupants of the cavernous room, with walls of hewn stone punctuated by arabesque carved doorways and filled with a soft light from above, are rapt with attention. Three men in flowing robes and large turbans watch while a barefoot carpet seller with a long beard works […]